Dante Gabriel Rossetti: biography and creativity

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Dante Gabriel Rossetti is an English poet, painter and illustrator who became one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In his works - paintings, poems and sonnets - he affirmed the purity of art, free from academicism, sang the romance of the Early Renaissance. One of the favorite themes of the Pre-Raphaelites was unhappy love. And the whole life of Rossetti, one way or another, revolved around her. Women inspired him, became the heroines of his paintings. However, the artist's relationship with his beloved cannot be called simple, as, indeed, his whole life.

Family

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born on May 12, 1828. His father, Gabriele Rossetti, was an Italian who emigrated to England for political reasons. He taught native language and literature at the Royal College. The father instilled in his son a love for Italian art, in particular for the works of Dante Alighieri, which was reflected not only in the boy's name, but also in the interests and aspirations that he will carry through his whole life.

Rossetti's mother - Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori - happenedfrom the family of Gaetano Polidori, a scientist and immigrant from Italy. From childhood, Dante Gabriel grew up in an atmosphere of art and was imbued early with his father's passion for the works of the great poet and theologian, after whom he received his name. His sisters and brother also had a literary talent. Maria Francesca is the author of Dante's Shadow. The younger sister, Christina, became famous as a poetess. And brother William became a co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Society and a literary critic.

Training

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose works began to be published when he was 15, studied at London's King's College from the age of 9. The first creative steps of the young author were made in literature. At the age of 5, Rossetti composed a drama, at 13 - a story. The artistic education of the boy was fragmentary. It began with a drawing school, where Rossetti entered at the age of 16 and where he studied under the guidance of D. S. Kotmen. Then, from 1841, there was the Henry Sass Academy of Painting. Five years later, he became a student of the class of ancient painting, which functioned at the Royal Academy.

Later, for some time, Dante's teacher is Madox Brown, a romantic artist, no less passionate about literature than Rossetti. In 1848, he met Holman Hunt, who would help him refine his technique of working with oil paints while creating the first Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

Fraternity Formation

The secret society, which gave rise to a new direction in poetry and painting, was formed in the 50s of the XIX century. Rossetti was then 18 years old. But thanks to temperament and a well-formed view of art,he was able to become the leader of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Together with Holman Hunt and the young John Everett Millais, they come to the conclusion that the academicism that dominated the painting of that period is full of conventions and blind imitation. He stifles art, rejecting almost any innovation. According to the members of the brotherhood, only a return to the traditions of Italian art of the Early Renaissance could revive English painting.

Return to simplicity and purity

The ideal for the Pre-Raphaelites was the manner of writing the great artists who worked before Raphael: Perugino, Fra Angelico, Giovanni Bellini. The British admired the simplicity and sincerity of the paintings of the Italian masters of the Early Renaissance. Purity and truth, reverence for the past and romanticism, rejection of the present and hostility to academicism were combined in the works of the Pre-Raphaelites with a bold reading of established subjects, and innovation in painting technique. They were guided by the masters of past eras, but they themselves gave rise to a trend that subsequently led to the development of modernity and gave rise to symbolism. The manifesto of the "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood" was published in the magazine "Sprout", published from January to April 1850 by members of the society.

A new take on a familiar plot

The letters P. R. B., meaning Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, appear for the first time in Rossetti's Youth of the Virgin Mary (1848-1849). The models for the canvas were the artist's mother and sister. And this is one of the differences between the Pre-Raphaelites and academicism: the members of the brotherhood, in their pursuit of naturalness, deliberatelyrefused the services of professional models, preferring friends and relatives.

In the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, they often turned to biblical subjects. However, their reading differed significantly from the images established in art. An example of this is one of the paintings that Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted, the Annunciation. In academic painting, the Virgin Mary has always been portrayed as an unearthly being, reverently accepting God's gift and the responsibility associated with it. In Rossetti's painting, we see the most ordinary girl, frightened by an angel and the news he brought. This interpretation corresponded to the Pre-Raphaelites' desire for truthfulness and, naturally, caused an uproar.

Rossetti is an artist

The best works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti created in the period from 1850 to 1860. His style is well recognizable: superficially static heroes, whose faces reflect boiling inner work, a composition with several large figures in the foreground and the smallest study of background elements. His paintings are full of symbols, born from the combination of real details and fantastic images. Rossetti did not use dark tones, minimizing chiaroscuro - his canvases seem to glow, the colors are clean and bright. The artist masterfully used the line in his works, giving expressiveness or tenderness to images with clear or trembling contours.

Art critics define Rossetti's painting as both decorative and monumental. Last propertybest expressed in the process of working on the painting of the walls located in one of the buildings of Oxford University. Selected subject - illustrations for the novel "The Death of King Arthur" by Thomas Malory.

Rossetti is a poet

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose poems are often ranked in importance with the works of Shakespeare, often used the same plots for sonnets and canvases. Painting and poetry are inseparable in his work. He drew themes for paintings in verse and filled poems and sonnets with special descriptiveness. Rossetti observed the ideals of the Pre-Raphaelites in his poetic works. He almost never spoke on topical issues, filling his poems with a medieval flavor. The sonnets and poems of Dante Gabriel are full of symbols and are distinguished by fine detail, like his canvases. He used archaic phrases, deliberately rearranged the stress in words, placed familiar expressions in an unexpected context and thereby achieved special expressiveness.

The main poetic work created by Dante Gabriel Rossetti is "The House of Life". This is a collection of 101 sonnets. Each of them describes some moment of the poet's life: a certain hour or a fleeting mood, a picture he saw or painted. Often Rossetti turned to ballads. He skillfully used ancient plots and techniques, combining them with modern techniques and creating works of impressive expressiveness.

Muses

Rossetti met his future wife in 1850. Elizabeth Siddole embodiedbeauty ideal of the Pre-Raphaelites and posed for many artists of the brotherhood. One of the most impressive paintings that immortalized her image belongs to Rossetti. “Beatrice blessed” depicts Dante Alighieri’s beloved in a sleepy state at the moment when a bird, symbolizing imminent death, puts a poppy flower in her palm. Elizabeth, ill with tuberculosis, died two years after the wedding, in 1862, from an overdose of opium (according to one version, it was suicide). The inconsolable widower put his “House of Life” in the coffin of his beloved. However, a few years later, Rossetti agreed to the exhumation of the body and the subsequent publication of poems.

Another muse of the artist was Fanny Cornforth, depicted by him in the painting “Lady Lilith” (Lady Lilith). Dante Gabriel Rossetti met a beautiful but uneducated girl in 1858, and their relationship lasted almost a lifetime, despite the artist's marriage and his relationship with Jane Morris. Fanny often posed for Rossetti. She is easily recognizable in the paintings "After the Kiss", "Lucretia Borgia" and the already named "Lady Lilith". Dante Gabriel Rossetti broke up with Fanny in 1877, when the artist's physical and mental he alth became very weak.

Recent years

After the death of Elizabeth, Rossetti became a recluse. At this time, along with Fanny, Jane Morris, the wife of his friend William, is of paramount importance for him. Her image appears in the paintings "Proserpina", "Marian", "Veronica Veronese" and many others. He alththe artist begins to weaken. He refuses to participate in exhibitions, his dependence on chloral hydrate increases. Jane lived with Rossetti for a long time with the tacit consent of her husband, who left for Iceland in 1871. However, noticing the increasing deterioration of her lover's mental state and his drug addiction, she moves away from Rossetti, and their relationship is reduced to correspondence.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti died on April 9, 1882. And two months later, an exhibition of all his works was held, which was a great success in England. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose biography is full of bright ups and tragic events, left an impressive mark on art. His works were imitated, masters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries studied on them. Today in art there is the term "rossetism", which unites the masters who worked in the manner of the great Pre-Raphaelite.